An approach to reducing the adverse effect of inappropriate human actions in nuclear power plant

From end-users to regulatory bodies, it is widely recognized that human-induced events including inappropriate human actions are one of the most crucial sources degrading the overall safety of nuclear power plants (NPPs). For example, the result of probabilistic safety assessment (PSA) conducted by Exelon nuclear company in US has revealed that the contribution of human error to the core damage frequency (CDF) of NPPs is about 58%. In addition, the analysis result of Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) has emphasized that the contribution of human error to CDF could be 80% at maximum. This means that a systematic framework through which inappropriate human actions can be effectively identified is necessary to enhance the safety of NPPs. For this reason, HiRITER (High Risk Inducible Task Evaluator) has been developed in this study, which is able to evaluate the effect of inappropriate human actions on risk as well as performance. In addition, a couple of real events that had occurred in domestic NPPs are simulated in order to validate the feasibility of HiRITER